Month: June 2013

With any new public project there is the potential to get it very right, or very very wrong, and with Cardiff council’s announcement of their intention to roll out free Wi-Fi throughout the city centre and Cardiff Bay they have the opportunity for it to be amazingly useful, or amazingly useless.

Free public Wi-Fi would mainly appeal to three groups; business users, tourists and casual users. It would be very important not to target, or exclude, any one group.

As an “anywhere worker” I use free Wi-Fi regularly, mostly provided at coffee shops, bars and restaurants where the connection is unlimited and unrestricted. They’re usually protected by WPA (encryption), so you just ask for the password, or at bigger chains like Starbucks it’s connect and go.

Having free Wi-Fi or not is a deciding factor on where I spend my mornings/afternoons working. For example, I spend more time at Caffe Nero than I do at Coffee#1 because Nero has free Wi-Fi and Coffee#1 do not, however when I’m not working I prefer Coffee#1. Caffe Nero therefore get about £10 a day out of me while I sit there for the life of my laptop battery and work.

Free Wi-Fi is also a bonus for tourism – I recently visited Lima, Peru and one of the districts, Miraflores, has a big public Wi-Fi initiative and has connected all their public spaces. People sit on benches surfing on their iPads and kids peer over their friends shoulders laughing at pictures on Facebook. There is no registration, you connect to the hotspot and go.
For me, being abroad and with mobile data turned off on my phone, free public Wi-Fi drew me to the parks to sit and catch up with news, email, and friends on social media. It is also a talking point between tourists, as it’s a unique feature. The result is a lot more people in public spaces, because there is more to do there.

Bringing people to the area is the main aim of a project like this. The idea is that if people gravitate somewhere for this service then they will spend more time there and spend more with the businesses in the area, or it could be used to fill up public spaces that may currently be underused.

Here are some “features” that could be thrown in that would kill it, and make it wholly undesirable:

Compulsory log-in/registrationRequiring a user to register for a service like this is pointless. The service cannot be tailored to the user with any real benefit. Details cannot be verified so to cite taking user details for “security purposes” would be fruitless; who is going to register using their real details and then commit crimes online, seriously? The only purpose for registration with a free Wi-Fi service, as you have with The Cloud and other providers, is to collect data which is later sold for profit. Cardiff’s free Wi-Fi offering should be connect and go.

Time limitationsWhy? The cost of the service to the council will not vary based on how many minutes somebody is connected, or how many megabytes they send and receive, so why limit their online time? The point of the service is to draw people to the areas that it is available, why only keep them there for 30 minutes?

It’s a simple concept really – set up lots of hotspots with good range to get good coverage, set it up to be click and connect (perhaps a welcome screen with a “connect” button could be tolerated), and have no limitation on how much of it you can use.

30 years is a long time. I haven’t been alive 30 years yet, though I have been exposed to a band for almost that entire time. My father bought a first edition vinyl in 1984, 6 months before I was born, of a band that were relatively unknown at the time. He wasn’t prospecting – I don’t think- he just bought a lot of albums, a hell of a lot of albums.

The record was the self-titled debut from The Smiths, a quirky northern band fronted by a bespectacled, gladioli waving boy with a distinguishable voice. Their style was very different for the time – jingly jangly guitar riffs, heavy drums padding the background and bass solos to wrap songs about the moors murders and yearly fairs in Rusholme, an inner city area of Manchester. By contrast at that time Duran Duran were on boats with synthesisers singing about some Brazilian girl and Spandau Ballet were putting out an ode to a precious metal.

I now have this record, and I daren’t play it. Although it’s been played before, I stick to Spotify or the MP3 recordings I made of it through a USB turntable (the only time I’ve played it). I don’t want it to scratch or crack, I want to pass it on to my son one day, so he can get the same enjoyment out of it that I did, and still get – that is of course if record players can still be found in 15 years’ time anywhere other than on the landfill heap.

It’s said that the best things are the shortest lived, and this can be vouched for with examples like the TV show Fawlty Towers (only 13 episodes, but a world renowned classic) or the movie career of James Dean (3 movies, but forever immortalised). The Smiths were only together for 4 years, and in that time put out 4 albums, but they are culturally one of the best known bands and widely sourced as “inspirational”, and Morrissey voted 2nd “Greatest living icon” in a 2006 BBC Culture Show poll.

People that grab on to the media tagging of The Smiths – and Morrissey in particular – as “miserable”, “depressing” or “sombre” have clearly not listened to more than a few tracks, as in their short history they managed to produce songs that covered the entire emotional spectrum.

I will concede that The Smiths did put out a good dose of depressing, upsetting or just plain sad songs, but they managed to disguise a few of them well by mixing high noted guitar riffs with particularly unhappy lyrics, Girlfriend in a coma & Unhappy birthday.

But seriously, Frankly Mr Shankly - which is an attack song – is one of the happiest and funniest of the mid 1980’s (and since); without The Smiths my world, and the world in its entirety would be a much gloomier place.